


The Chrono Trigger Alphabet

by argle_fraster



Category: Chrono Trigger
Genre: Alternate Ending, F/M, Gen, M/M, Magic Meta, antiquity, pre-history, present
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-02-19
Updated: 2014-03-01
Packaged: 2017-10-31 10:56:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 7,331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/343282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/argle_fraster/pseuds/argle_fraster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A look at Chrono Trigger through a variety of scenes and a number of characters. On tumblr, I decided to do the fic alphabet meme with Chrono Trigger. The ficlets cover nearly all of the characters, time periods, and themes, so the tags apply to the work overall. Speculation, meta, time continuums, and magic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A is for Antiquity

She feels the Mammon Machine even when she is dreaming. In her dreams, it pounds against her lungs and makes it difficult to breathe; she wakes often in a cold sweat, remnants of visions fading quicker than she can get a handle on them. She doesn’t wish to remember them - for they leave an aftertaste like the machine does, like the bitter, copper sting at the back of her tongue when she pours her magic into her pendant - but she does wonder what they mean. The machine, and Lavos, pulse inside her chest though she tries to rid herself of the awful itch beneath her skin the thing always leaves behind.

She wishes that she could leave; Enhasa, perhaps, where she could curl into one of the finely embroidered beds and dream without hitching on Lavos and magic, but she knows her mother will never let her go. Queen Zeal has no use for dreams anymore - not when her reality is far better than any ambition she could have fabricated in her mind.

Schala lost her father when she was only four, her stepfather when she was ten. She wonders when it was that she officially lost her mother.

As she lays awake in bed with her eyes turned up towards the ceiling, counting the curves carved into the stone that number as high as the stars in the sky, her bedroom door creaks open. Her lady-in-waiting never opens without first knocking. Schala doesn’t get up, because she already knows who it is.

“You were dreaming again,” Janus says. Even in the darkness, he knows his way around the dressers and desks and trunks in her room. When he reaches the side of the bed, he climbs up into it, sliding cold, uncovered feet beneath the sheets.

“I’m sorry,” Schala tells him.

Where Janus goes, Alfador follows - the kitten jumps up atop the end of the duvet at the bottom of the bed and curls there, tiny paws hiding his pink nose. In the bit of moonlight streaming in through the windows, he looks more cerulean than violet.

“Stop thinking about her,” Janus admonishes. He turns over on the pillow with his fists mashed up beneath it.

“I’m not, really,” Schala says, and it’s mostly truth. Janus doesn’t say anything else in response; perhaps he too is not really thinking about her.

After awhile, he sighs a bit into the linens. “I wish we could leave.”

“Where would we go?” Schala asks with a little laugh. “There’s nowhere here but down.”

“Then we go down,” Janus says. He sounds forceful. Hopeful. Ten years and much, much older. “We go down and we build a new kingdom on the ground. We make it better than this one. Bigger. More powerful than everything here.”

“What else?”

Janus thinks for a moment, quieting. “Nus,” he says. “I want Nus to carry me around all the time. And I want a bed for Alfador that’s covered in gold. And whenever I snap my fingers, someone brings me spiced tea with just the right amount of sugar in it. Because it’ll be cold. We’ll have fireplaces that warm us all the time.”

But there’s nothing on the ground but freezing days that never seem to end and the peaks of mountains long enshrouded with snow. Schala shakes her head, though her brother can’t see it, and runs her fingers over her forehead - there’s a bit of moisture there, leftover from the ghost of Lavos’ power that’s still pounding in her veins.

“Schala?” Janus asks, when she fails to answer.

“I wish I could do that for you,” she whispers. There’s wetness on her cheeks and she isn’t exactly sure when she started crying. Her fingers are humming. She can feel her pendant, on the desk in the middle of the room sitting within a pouch made of crushed velvet, calling to her, even now. “I wish I could make this all better for you.”

Janus reaches for her. “Stop it,” he says, and it sounds harsh, but only because there’s so much fear behind it.

“You deserve better than this,” Schala whispers.

“We all do,” Janus says, softly, after a long moment with just his fingers wrapped around her arm. He shifts in, closer, so that he can curl up beside her form, and if the shaking of her sobs disturbs him, he doesn’t say anything about it.

Schala lets her fingers rest in the feather-fine strands of his hair that falls through her hand like sand in an hourglass - they all are sand, waiting to be funneled through the opening. “Someday,” she promises, whispered against his temple, “I’ll make that kingdom for you, Janus.”

“Okay,” he says. HIs fingers fist tighter in her nightshift.

Down the hall, past the slumbering bulk of the Nu, the Mammon Machine pulses in its constant roar, filling the corridors with bloodred light, and even after Janus’ breathing has evened and slowed, Schala can feel it in her head, in tune with her rapid, terrified heartbeat.


	2. B is for Battle

The first time she made a weapon, it was just to see if she could, if the mechanics worked and the plugs lined up and the metal shell held up under the heat. The first time she _used_ a weapon, she watched the fiend fall to a smoking heap on the ground and twitch before falling completely still and felt her stomach drop out from underneath her.

She thought maybe it was going to get easier; the truth is, it never does.

“How do you do it?” she asks Frog, when they are sitting around a fire as the moon rises high in the sky. When he looks over at her in question, eyes golden in the flickering flames and unblinking, she shakes her head, stumbling to add, “How do you deal with being a knight when you know you have to kill things?”

“You think about the oath you swore,” Frog replies.

Lucca is silent for a long minute. The logs in the fire crackle like boots stepping on twigs. “Have you ever killed a person?”

She doesn’t get an answer for a very long time. After awhile, she begins to wonder if she even will; then she feels bad, guilty in the core of her stomach, like she asked a question that she never should have voiced.

“I’m sorry,” she says, quiet. “It’s probably not something you talk about.”

“No,” Frog tells her. He shakes his head, webbed fingers curing around the hilt of his sword. “No, it’s fine. And yes. I have killed a man before.”

“Do you still see him?” Lucca asks.

Frog sighs, long and low, and says, “Every night, I see his eyes staring at me before I go to sleep.”

It’s different when it’s robots and machines: Lucca loves them, but she knows it’s different. It’s even different when it’s Fiends, even though it shouldn’t be. But she can’t imagine taking a human life. She felt guilty enough knocking out the guards when rescuing Crono from his impending death sentence.

“How do you deal with it?” she asks.

“You pray,” Frog says, turning his large eyes on her once more. In them, she can see the fire and herself - maybe it’s the same thing, the two. She feels the flames in her fingertips; maybe it always has been the same thing. “You pray,” he repeats, “and you find a way to do something good for the world in penance.”


	3. C is for Cyrus

Cyrus, it seems, is the most popular knight-to-be in the order.

It’s not a question of why; Glenn knows why. Cyrus smiles with his whole face, eyes lighting up when one of the other recruits tells a joke. He helps the younger boys with their swords, showing them how to hold the hilt and how to balance their weight between both feet as they settled into a defensive position. Cyrus is the kind of person that one opens to readily and easily, because everyone wants him to care about them.

And Glenn is no exception.

He feels a sharp thrill of pleasure when Cyrus sees him standing at the edge of the training ground, grabbing a cloth and making his way over to the side while pausing the exercises.

“Come to see what you’re missing?” Cyrus laughs, his palm coming down hard between Glenn’s shoulders; it feels like their youth again, when they’d been practicing with wooden sticks in the forest until they were both weak with exhaustion and adrenaline. “Still’d love to have you in the ranks.”

“And you still know what my answer is,” Glenn replies, but he can feel the heat in his cheeks anyway. He likes knowing that Cyrus wants him there - he likes knowing that Cyrus wants Glenn watching his back.

One of the younger boys brings Cyrus a small tin of water as Cyrus leans back against the large, thick trunk of the tree guarding the area’s perimeter. The recruits practicing are good; not as good as Cyrus, and Glenn easily spots the holes in their movements and parries, but they aren’t bad. For sons of bakers and blacksmiths, the king’s army could do much worse. Cyrus drinks quickly from the tin and sighs, beads of perspiration glittering on his forehead.

“What do you think?” he asks, gesturing out towards the field and the men still training within it. “Can we beat the Fiend army?”

“I certainly hope you never have to,” Glenn says. The southern lands have been plagued with rumors and fear lately. It’s not unthinkable that perhaps a war really is brewing, but he prefers not to think of it.

Cyrus just laughs. “But if we had to, would we win?”

“They’re not bad,” Glenn says, carefully. “That one there, with the dented breastplate - he’s quick on his feet if you train him to keep his shield in front of his body rather than to the side of him. And that man near the edge, with the square helm, he can whack that sword hard enough to take a tree branch down.”

“All this in five minutes?” Cyrus asks. He sounds impressed. Glenn forces down another hot rush of pride. “You do pay attention.”

Glenn shrugs, hoping that he looks casual. “I just like to know who is going to be behind you in a real battle, to make sure they’re good enough.”

“Never going to be as good as you, Glenn,” Cyrus laughs again, and reaches over to tangle his fingers in Glenn’s hair; perpetually lagging behind in height, Glenn just grimaces, pushing Cyrus’ hand away. Inside, he doesn’t completely mind.

“How is the queen?” Glenn asks.

Cyrus’ smile curves further upwards, corners crinkling. “Well,” he replies. “Beautiful. Kind and generous as ever.”

“She’s your king’s wife,” Glenn warns, and then ducks the elbow that is jabbed in the direction of his ribs - he’s not wearing Cyrus’ platemail.

“And you’re my best friend,” Cyrus says, “but don’t think that will stop me from pummeling you mercilessly.”

He moves as if he’s going to attack Glenn with his hands - the tickle war is inevitable, and Glenn skips out of the way to avoid it - and then the commander calls for Cyrus to return to training and the other man has no choice but to obey. He gives Glenn a wry grin and a salute with two fingers, and Glenn just nods back.

He stays for awhile, just to watch them train.

Sometimes, he does wish he’d agreed to join the ranks, if only so that he could be the one sparring with Cyrus during practices.


	4. D is for Dactyl

Sometimes, Ayla climbs to the top of the Dactyl nesting grounds and rides one of the reptiles to the place where the Tyranno Lair used to be, the smoking crater of ruins that shows nothing of what used to be there. It’s strange, looking at where it used to be; strange because, like Laruba Village, it was just simply gone. Swept away by fire and heat and a force so strong that it shook the ground.

After the hand-fasting ceremony, she wakes early with Kino still snoring on the skins next to her and leaves. The air is hot and thick already, heavy around her shoulders like the weight of a hunt she is carrying back towards the tents. The winds are changing - she can feel it. There is something coming, something that arrived with the red star from the sky, and she doesn’t know what it is, but she knows that it is coming. She goes to the nesting grounds and tries not to think as the Dactyl beats its leathery wings over the mottled landscape below, bright with greens and yellows and browns.

She is not alone at the crater across the fiery river that crackles and burns. The Laruba chief is there, without the feathers of his headdress.

“Old man come see hole?” Ayla asks, as she dismounts and slides down the Dactyl’s smooth, rippled hide.

“No understand,” the chief says. He sighs, and shakes his head; his palm is pressed against the rock of the cave that pulses with energy. Ayla knows what he is feeling - it’s what she felt, after the crater happened. Lavos is deep underground, but this was the spot that he entered. She can feel it here. “Things here, strange.”

The Laruba chief has come out of hiding recently, with the Reptites gone. Azala’s threat is no longer hanging over them, and so, the villagers have emerged from the long grass that once hid their tents.

“Things always strange,” Ayla tells him, because the chief knows nothing of strange until he has watched Crono make a thunderstorm between his hands. “But, life strange. Life good.”

“Life good?” the chief repeats. “Life change.”

“Like air,” Ayla says, and nods. The chief can feel it too, the chill in the air at night - soon, she fears, things will be very different. She can’t imagine it, but she has seen the huts made of solid stone that go up into the sky higher than she can see.

Ayla sits down, feeling the pulsing warmth of Lavos rising up from beneath her. She thinks about Lavos and Crono and magic, even if it gives her a headache sometimes. “Old man know air change? Get cold. Air get cold, so ground get cold, too.”

The chief shakes his head again. “Plants die.”

“What?” Ayla starts. “Plants not die. Ground not die.”

“If ground die, plants die,” the chief tells her. “Air get cold. World change.”

Ayla thinks about this for a moment. She thinks of going in the flying machine of Crono’s and finding the world made entirely of white, where her toes turned blue when she walked through the fluffy ground cover.

“So, world change,” she concedes. “Then Ayla change, too.”

“Ayla not change this,” the chief says.

He has a point. Ayla couldn’t change Lavos, either, and to prove that, she reaches out to press both palms flat against the cave wall. She thinks about drawing a picture of Lavos, of the red star; she thinks about trying to tell others about it and not knowing how. Lucca had shown her stories with pictures instead of just words. Ayla could make stories and tell others about her life. She could tell others about Lavos, and the world changing, too.

She drops her hands down and puts a hand to her stomach. Soon, her own body will change. Everything changes. And then Kino will be chief, and Ayla will tell stories with pictures to her baby.

“No,” Ayla says, finally, chewing on her bottom lip. “Ayla no change this. But Ayla do things. Ayla survive.”

“Ayla strong,” the Laruba chief says.

Ayla raises a hand again, feeling the rumbling from deep below them and hearing the huff of the Dactyls just outside the cave’s lip and feeling the swell of pride for her own future sweep through her form, settling in her belly, in her change, in her life. “Maybe,” she admits. “Ayla make others strong, too.”

“Ayla brave,” the chief replies. “Village follow Ayla.”

“Ayla help village survive,” Ayla promises. “Ground die, but village not. Ayla keep village alive.”

The chief says nothing more, and one of the Dactyls gives a bleet of boredom, and Ayla just thinks.


	5. E is for Eulogy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Based on the ending where you defeat Lavos before reviving Crono.

It seems that Leene's Bell has been transposed down a half-step - the bell rings in minor tones instead of major ones, vibrating through Marle's veins, even though she knows, in her head, that nothing about the instrument has changed. Still, sitting in the festival that's filled with bright colors and the piping of music on the breeze, she feels acutely alone.

In her hands, she cradles the amulet. It reminds her of him. Sometimes, in her dreams, she sees him as he was: vibrant and strong. She sees him with his jaw squared and his eyes alight with purpose. She sees him as she remembers him, and that's the hardest part of all, because memory is, now the only thing of him she'll carry with her.

The others are nearby, taking part in the festivities, and they don't approach her. Marle both loves and hates them for that. Lucca has had bags around her eyes for days, and yet still, Marle can't bring herself to voice his name. It hurts. Everything about it hurts, and she's selfish, because she wants to carry it close to her heart. It's hers, and she intends to keep it that way.

She watches Lucca barter with Melchoir over the price of a few errant pieces of iron, and wonders what could have been had the flow of time not claimed its prize.

A figure settles next to her, on the stones of the fountain, and Marle doesn't glance in his direction.

"It's not easy," Magus says.

Marle ignores him; of course it isn't. Her entire life had been easy, and then Crono happened - now, her life is ice beneath her fingertips and her crossbow between her palms. Her life is trying to save humanity and they did that, but still, there was a price. There was always a price.

She thinks about the reflection of their forms in Lavos' dead eyes, and closes her eyes so she can swallow down the bile that creeps up her throat.

"When Lavos claims a prize, it's final."

Marle opens her eyes again; the race has started, and the scaled-green reptile is in the lead. "Crono was never offered." She is surprised by the venom in her own voice.

"He offered himself," Magus says, shrugging, and that much Marle sees out of the corner of her eye. "He chose to pay the price."

"He shouldn't have," Marle tells him. It nearly chokes her. Her fingers close involuntarily around the pendant held in her lap, and she imagines the metal burning a hole straight through to her bones - to her soul.

There is a moment of nothing but the sounds of the fair around them, and then Magus says, "It was his choice."

Marle is about to say something, to rail at him - for Magus is an easy target. She's aimed her own magic at him and felt the blast of his back in return, and he's a willing victim. But then she stops, because in her mind's eye, she sees Schala's hands wrapped around the pendant just as her own are. She sees Schala's hooded gaze half-hidden behind cerulean tendrils of hair.

"You miss her," she says, instead of her rebuke.

"Every day," Magus replies.

"And it - it was her choice, too," Marle continues, throat closing as she speaks. She wonders if Magus will become angry with her. "She chose to die for us. She - she chose to die for _you_."

She looks at the balloons, colors vivid and garish against the green and blue backdrop of the land meeting the sea.

"She did," Magus admits, voice soft.

"Do you hate her for it?" Marle asks. She turns to him, and it's the reason she sees the surprise on his face, flitting across his features before they settle back down into their usual neutrality.

His fingers in his gloves flex and pull, and he seems to be considering for a moment. "Yes," he replies, and then adds, "and no."

"Me, too," Marle whispers.

After a long moment, where neither of them speak, Marle has to blink back the hot sting of tears. Her hand closes completely over the amulet so that it's nearly hidden from view. "Does it get better?" she asks, emotion swelling up from her chest. "Does it hurt less?"

"Yes," Magus says, turning towards her, "and no."

"I don't hate you." She doesn't even mean to say it - it just tumbles out. There's too much emotion, and she can't hold things back. Again, he looks surprised; that's twice, then, that she's managed to elicit that reaction from him. She wonders idly if she should feel proud of it.

Magus looks at her with the barest hint of a smile. "You will make a good queen."

For a long moment, she just stares at him, and then finally wrenches her gaze away to look back on the races. Maybe he's always really _seen_ her - seen past the guise, past the smiles, past the things she put up as a front to conceal everything else.

"Are you going to look for her?" she asks. For some reason, she fears the answer.

Magus nods, once.

"Will you come back to visit?"

His gaze on her face is very open. After a second's thought, he nods again.

Marle lets out the air she'd been holding in her lungs. "Good," she breathes, and slips the amulet into her pocket - it's better there, as a comforting lump against her leg. Maybe, in time, it won't bring so much pain to look on it. Crono gave his life so that they could win.

Crono gave his life so that she could keep hers, and she knows that, smoldering like an ember in her stomach.

She smiles at him, and she wonders if the expression is a bit crooked.

"You know," she starts, "I'd really like some candy."

One corner of Magus' mouth twitches upwards, and he rises, cape billowing out behind him as he holds a hand out for her. "I think I know where you might find some," he says.


	6. F is for Fiona

The first year, they work on cultivating and fertilizing the land so that the trees will grow strong and tall. It’s a bit disheartening to Marco that they have made so little visible progress - at least that is what Robo assumes, given the man’s reactions.

“This is for later,” Fiona tells him, as she lovingly places a seed into the ground. “It would be better with saplings, but we just don’t have any. It has to start from scratch.”

“You won’t even be able to see the rewards from it,” Marco says in response. Robo wonders what it must feel like to know that there is an end to one’s life - and that the work one has done will not come to fruition before the end. It tries to understand, but it can’t. It doesn’t have those capabilities.

It works, though, at Fiona’s side, and together, the ground is dug and overturned and seeds are planted within it.

—

The next year, there is less work. Marco enlists in the king’s army again, and is gone for months at a time for training. Fiona says that with the Fiendlord defeated, there is less to fight against, but still, the king must be vigilant.

Robo just waddles through the lines of seed mounds and waters them, diligently, every day.

—

The year the saplings finally emerge from the dirt, Fiona has a baby swaddled in a cradle near the fireplace of the house.

“She’ll see the trees,” Fiona says, as she watches the baby coo and giggle. “The trees are for her, not me.”

“Indeed,” Robo agrees. It is fascinated by the tiny infant; just like the seeds they planted outside, the baby, too, will grow to be an amazing full-grown size. Human life is breath-taking in its beauty and simplicity. “She will like the trees, I think.”

Fiona smiles and says, “I hope so,” as the baby latches onto her finger.

—

When the saplings are as tall as Fiona with weak, spindly trunks, Marco is injured in a skirmish with the Fiends and sent home. He takes to his bed. Fiona spends most of her time washing his wounds and nursing him, but Marco is weak, and Robo can see it in the man’s face.

It doesn’t say anything. It would be wrong to point out the obvious, with Fiona so worried and upset and the children barely beginning to grow. Robo tends the trees with care, making sure that they have space to grow tall and strong, and anchoring them firmly to the ground with ropes so that they sprout straight into the air.

Fiona’s eldest, Marta, helps sometimes.

“They look so small,” she says, wrinkling her nose at the odd, unimpressive looking trees dotting the land. “They’ll get big?”

“They will,” Robo tells her. “Just like you.”

—

Marco dies the next autumn from wounds he never recovered from. Fiona wants him buried on the hill, in the open area they left free of saplings, so there he is laid to rest.

Marta cries. Fiona does not.

Robo stands with her for a long time, though, because it thinks she requires his presence.

“All those years I spent worrying,” Fiona says, reaching down to touch her fingers to the gravestone and then jerking back, as if it burned her. “Were they all for nothing?”

“Years do not mean anything,” Robo tells her. “I have learned this much. Time is a very strange thing.”

Fiona doesn’t respond, but the next day, she works in the fields with renewed vigor, delicate fingers making sure each trunk is sure and solid.

—

The children grow with the trees. Marta gets bright and beautiful and Hector gets tall, taller than his mother. They both have Fiona’s light hair and Marco’s dark eyes. Robo likes when they help in the fields and when they come home from school and sit among the branches that have criss-crossed in the feet above their heads.

But they must leave; Marta gets married to the baker’s son in Porre, and Hector wants to join the army like his father.

When they are gone, the house is very quiet. Fiona tends the trees - which have doubled and thickened so that their bark is rough and coarse and their leaves are wide - with the same tender care she gave her babies.

“They will come back to this place,” Robo tells her.

“I know,” Fiona says. She smiles at him, and there are lines on her face, beneath her eyes, spread out like bird’s feet. “I grew it for them.”

—

By the time the trees are giving shade and cover, branches holding nests of birds and the honeycomb hives of bees, Fiona’s hair has gone as white as the snow in winter, and Marta has two children at her feet.

Robo does not think it safe for Fiona to be working in the fields. She looks tired too often and too much; Robo tells her to sit by the fire instead. It begins taking over the cooking of meals, which comes easily after many years of watching Fiona’s movements. It begins sweeping the house and cleaning the wash. It is not strange going from the trees to Fiona - they feel like the same thing, an extension of one another.

—

Fiona sits by the fire. There is a blanket across her lap - she is too tired and sick to walk.

“One last time,” she sighs, with eyes folding into the wrinkles of her skin, “I’d like to walk in the trees.”

“They are dropping acorns,” Robo tells her. “And I found a trampled nest that saw many birds tended in it.”

This seems to please her. Fiona’s mouth curves upwards.

“When I’m gone, Marta’s son will come here to care for the trees,” she says.

Robo nods. “He told me,” it agrees.

“He’ll be good to the forest. He’s a good boy.”

Fiona shivers, as if she’s cold, and Robo moves the blanket to cover her shoulders and hang down her torso.

“Don’t forget me,” she says, with the barest hint of a laugh. “You’ve been my constant companion all these years, don’t forget me.”

“Never,” Robo promises. Its time with Fiona has been marked with light and love. The trees - their legacy - are growing lush and strong from their devotions.

Fiona reaches out and her knobby, crooked fingers find Robo’s arm; they curl around the metal. Robo wishes it could feel their warmth it knows is there.

“When you save the world,” she whispers, leaning in. “Think of me.”

—

Marta and Hector bury Fiona on the hill, next to Marco. Robo spends three days there, body turned to barely running. It wonders what it feels like to die. The absence of existence is not a concept that it understands. But it knows that Fiona is gone and there is a hole in the world.

The trees seem to sing a requiem, a lament, and then Robo powers back on again.

Marta’s son comes to help in the spring.


	7. G is for Ghosts

“Someday, someone is going to come and save us.”

“You mean _fix_ us.”

“Yeah, of course,” Masa corrects himself, “I mean fix us.”

Sometimes, when everything is still and the mountain is shrouded in the shadows of dusk, he can still hear the bells riding on the wind - they sound like regret, like death knolls for everything that fell apart so many thousands of years ago. It’s strange to listen to them and feel like he’s there again, standing in the hall of the Mammon Machine.

Sometimes he can still feel the machine, too, buried deep beneath the earth and humming. He doesn’t like that part. He doesn’t like the reverberations that echo through the steel of the sword.

“And when they fix us, we’ll be amazing again,” Mune says. He’s running around the cave with his arms outstretched; pudgy fingers splayed in every direction. Masa can feel the air flying by Mune’s face, but doesn’t get up himself. The sword is singing a sad song of loneliness today, and at least with his own hand pressed against the angle of the blade, things seem a bit better.

“We’re amazing now,” Masa says.

Mune rockets up and around the sword’s outcropping, growling in his throat. “Of course we are!”

But they aren’t, and that’s really the worst part of it. Masa runs his hands over the handle, and the sword sighs.

Mune drops both arms back down to his sides. “He’s eating again.”

“He’s always eating,” Masa says. He doesn’t look up.

“You know he’s going to come and eat us up some day. Schwoop!” Mune smacks his lips together. “Just like a frog eating a bug.”

The sword shakes beneath Masa’s palm, and even additional pressure doesn’t still it. Masa can hear the bells on the trembling metal. “No, he won’t.”

Mune resumes his makeshift flying - maybe he’s a Dactyl, or an airship, like the ones that used to buzz through the sky and leave puffs of dark smoke behind them. Mune had loved the airships.

So had Masa, but he tries not to think about them anymore.

“When he comes up, can we fight him?” Mune asks, and climbs up on one of the rock outcroppings just to jump off it again.

“Maybe.”

“I hope we hit him right in the eye!” Mune crows; he throws both hands above his head and makes sharp, small circles until he’s too dizzy to continue and collapses in the dirt. Masa can hear his ragged breaths all the way across the cave.

The sword whispers its agreement.

“We will,” Masa promises, and hopes that he won’t have to eat his words. “We will.”

There’s a long moment of quiet, with only the wind at his ears.

“Masa?”

“Yeah.”

Mune’s head tilts to one side. “When will someone come?”

“Soon,” Masa says, and leans forward to press his forehead against the dirty, broken hilt.


	8. H is for Heroes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger/Cross connections

Despite the fact that the Chancellor may have a heart attack running around like he is - he's even refusing the water brought by several of the palace servants, and the sweat is dripping off his brow as he rushes to and fro, carrying balloons and strings of lights and lanterns that glow in different colors - the Moonlight Parade is a beautiful success.

The truth is, it's nice to see everyone with a smile on their face. Marle, cheeks illuminated by the flickering lights, Crono with his hands clasped in his lap. Frog and his sword, sitting with his speckled face upturned towards the fireworks, and Ayla clapping her hands when the cannons boom. Even Robo seems pleased; if he could smile, Lucca thinks he would be.

And amidst all the joy and laughter, all the delight at the wonders of innovations painting the sky with showers of rainbow-colored embers, she sees a face pointed at the ground rather than the celebration, and arms folded closely over a chest, like a safeguard.

She maneuvers her way through the crowd, and Melchoir doesn't look up when she reaches his side.

"You did good," he says, and she knows he's already identified her, without needing to see her face - he's intuitive like that. She wonders if that trait came from being a Guru, or simply being the heart of a magical kingdom where supernatural powers lurked around every doorway.

"So did you."

He smiles a little, but the action seems more sad than pleased. "Ah, but this is not a day for old men whose lives are already gone. This is a day for heroes."

"You are a hero," Lucca tells him. "You all were."

"History will not remember our names," Melchoir says.

It's true; Belthasar, and his machines hidden away in the shadow of a mountain, in a time when eking out a living is the most difficult thing one can do, and Gaspar, caught forever in the crossroads of time where nothing ever ages. No one will know who they were or what they did - the only people who knew that lived thousands of years ago.

"We will," Lucca promises him. She reaches over to find his hand, fingers gnarled and wrinkled with age and rough with the fires of the forge he's spent his life bent over. There's something comforting in the callouses lining the palm of his hand. "We'll always remember what you all did for us, and for everyone."

Melchoir's face softens, and his gaze finally settles on her. He looks older than she remembers. Maybe it's time playing tricks on her - or maybe the last centuries have caught up with him, finally, pushing the continuum down a hill so that it gathers speed as it rolls.

"Ah," he says, and nods, "then I think that will be a fitting memorial."

"Someone has to write down what happened here," Lucca says. "Or else we all risk forgetting everything again."

"History is doomed to repeat itself."

Lucca gives his hand a squeeze. "But we broke that cycle."

"Did we?" Melchoir asks.

She should ask more - what he means, if he knows something. She's standing next to a man who has looked the time streams in the face and come out alive; she could say the same about herself, and her friends, but they meant to jump into those portals, and Melchoir never did. There's an answer to her unasked question on those blue eyes, and she should push further, but she doesn't, because she's afraid. She hates to admit it, but she is afraid to know that their efforts may have saved absolutely nothing at all.

"Tomorrow," Melchoir says, very quietly, so quiet that Lucca has to strain to hear him with the fireworks bursting over head, "you should take a walk in the forest near the castle. I hear it'll be a nice day."

"Okay," Lucca whispers. She runs her tongue over her bottom lip. "What will you do?"

Melchoir looks up at the fireworks, and the wrinkles on his face are alight with color. "Well, I'll be working, of course. A craftsman never sleeps. Just last night, I thought of a new design for a sword - it will be unparalleled in all the land."

Lucca doesn't let go of his hand. She's afraid that if she does, she'll spin off into the vortexes all over again, lost and adrift.

"What will you call it?" she asks.

"Einlanzer," he replies. He cocks his head to one side, and then nods. "A fitting name for a hero's sword."

He says nothing more, and they stand shoulder to shoulder through the fireworks display, watching the colors explode in the sky and the people cheer, and Lucca wonders if tomorrow it will all disappear again.


	9. I is for Inevitability

Leene welcomes him back with open arms - there's nothing false or faked in the smile that lights her face, and he knows that she will always feel the same, no matter how the years change her. She is warm and kind, and the castle soldiers are polite, but there is only so long that he can stay within the confines before he begins to feel trapped.

(He wonders if this has something to do with how free he felt, with the wind against his face as they flew across the sky in the Epoch, time lapping at their heels wishing it could catch up.)

Eventually, he leaves, and though he does not know exactly where he plans to go, his feet take him on the path anyway - back to the southern tip of the continent, where the trees are dense and thick, and his abode is still tucked away beneath the strong, gnarled roots that lope across the top of the soil.

It isn't that he's hiding; he finished that, long ago, when Crono appeared wielding both the Hero's Medal and the Masamune itself. He feels comfortable here, in his space. He takes the sword off his belt and lets it rest on two branch-hooks in the muddy walls. He won't hide it, either, and it, too, shall stay here with him, as a reminder of all the things that he has done, and the history that wraps itself around his form like a cocoon.

Then he sleeps. For a long time, he feels that all he does is sleep.

\--

When he goes into Porre, the mayor is pleased to see him, and his wife always offers Frog a bit of leftover stew or bread to help him on his way. Sometimes, he travels north and visits Robo and Fiona, though the dissonance of knowing that the Robo here, in his time, has many long years left to work is always strange. But he doesn't return to the castle, and he doesn't venture further than Truce, and his life enters a period of normalcy and complacency.

Tata grows tall, and Frog tells him that once the boy reaches manhood, they will share a drink at the tavern, and laugh about the fallacies of being a true Hero.

\--

The years are not unkind, but they are unrelenting, and perhaps that's why it is so strange and jarring, so _wrong_ , when Frog wakes up and finds human hands curled around the woven blanket atop his form. It takes him longer than he cares to admit to actually work them; his limps feel heavy and unforgiving, trembling, and he struggles with basic grips now that the muscles have changed.

He stumbles when he attempts to walk across the muddy floor. His legs, now long and gangly, like rods attached to his feet, do not seem to answer his body's commands. The things he once used to know are foreign to him - rather than coming home, he feels like he has been ousted from his own life and imprisoned in that of another. For so long, the webbing between his fingers had been the reality his brain accepted, and now, he can't force his thoughts around it.

He does not leave for several days, attempting to adjust. When he pulls the Masamune from the branches, he finds he no longer knows how to wield her; the grip is odd and thin in his fist, and his arm tries to mimic movements that, now, end in a cut to his opposite forearm and a trip across the dirt.

What a strange sort of twist it is that he finds himself longing for his frog form, the part of himself that he had finally grown accustomed to.

\--

He does not go to Porre, nor to Truce. He avoids Robo and Fiona and the children playing in the small sprigs of trees. He goes to the only place he knows to go, guided by something he can't explain, and the Masamune hums in the scabbard when he passes through the magic cave and into the tunnels beneath the sea. They smell of water-logged dirt and damp stones, of the rats that permeate the corridor.

There are no more fiends in the Fiendlord's keep. He is alone walking the halls, wondering where the true end is. This isn't where he was changed, but it is where he found himself again, and his boots echo through the walls as he makes his way back through again.

He does not expect to find anyone within, and he is right.

At the antechamber where the confrontation happened, he finds bits of wax that has long since melted and cooled into puddles, of candelabras knocked over and never re-righted, and of a layer of dust that covers everything. He stays there for a long time, wondering why he came here, and what he had sought to find.

"Well," he says, aloud, and his human voice is strange even to his own ears. It's lower, vocal cords lengthened and aged - it doesn't even sound like him anymore. "Is that it?"

He receives no reply from the room. He kicks at one of the fallen brass posts, and winces when it clatters across the floor.

"Is this what happens when you die?" he asks, at large. "Was the spell tied to your own life, or did it simply run its course?"

How ironic, really, that he misses the amphibian more than anything else. He knew who he was as Frog; he doesn't know Glenn at all. He grabs at his hair, still surprised to find it there, and hunches down, crouched low, wishing that there was relief buried somewhere in the myriad of other emotions washing over him.

"You're a coward," he says, and he isn't sure who he is addressing. "You are a coward for all of this, and for never righting it in the first place."

Or perhaps it is he who lacked courage, for he never thought to ask.

There is a wisp of wind against his face, and he straightens, heart leaping, but there is nothing there. Still, he starts forward with one hand outstretched, and it isn't until he reaches the middle of the room that he feels it - the ripple. Where the gate had formed, there is still a tangle in the threads, and he can feel it. He slowly reaches his hand in, and watches his fingers begin to distort and wave.

It should be gone, long taken by Lavos' defeat, but the echo remains, just like everything else. Glenn doesn't know where it will take him.

"I don't know where you found your end," he says, "or if it found you at all. But I know that this is not my life anymore."

Following the knot could lead him nowhere. Or, he could find what he seeks, even if he doesn't know now what it even is. Glenn steps once, and then twice, and lets the ripple in time carry him away from the life he once knew.


End file.
